


Dead Man's Hand

by kittensalad



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Death, Gen, Graphic Description, Not Canon Compliant, Patricide, basically a rewrite of the events of one eyed jacks, brain: what if jonnys backstory is actually more traumatic, me: oh my god what if his backstory is more traumatic, than he makes it seem, than hes making it seem, they got a tag for everything!, wow theres a tag for that
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:14:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27001024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittensalad/pseuds/kittensalad
Summary: Jonny Vangelis is 16 when he gets sold to Jack.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Jonny d'Ville
Comments: 3
Kudos: 50





	1. I Know That Your Hands Are Already Red

**Author's Note:**

> *takes a break from writing mechs fic to write. more mechs fic.* so you know how all the mechs have traumatic backstories. well what if i made jonnys backstory more traumatic just for fun. what if.  
> so this is a "jonny got sold to jack to pay his fathers debts and killed a lot more people than just his dad" au

Jonny Vangelis is 16 when he kills his mother.

It’s a hot, sticky New Texan night, more flies than air, but it feels like rain. The heat permeates everything, and Jonny feels medium-rare. Like he could cut himself open and he’d be cooked. For some reason, though, he smells a storm. It hasn’t rained in New Texas for eight years, but the sky somehow bodes rain. Clear, but with an impossible threat of splitting open any second and drenching the barren, forgotten earth with God’s piss.

The neon motel sign buzzing above him is a familiar weight in his ears. Grounding. Sounds like home. They’ve lived here forever, Jonny, his mother, and Billy. Jonny doesn’t call him dad. It’s a one bedroom motel room with no hot water or air conditioning, soggy vinyl flooring and black masses of cockroaches hiding under literally everything. Jonny sleeps in the bathtub, when he sleeps at all. Mother was a working girl, but then she got knocked up. Now she works as a tailor, and a shitty one at that; what little money she makes from mending holes in vests or taking in pant legs goes to old One Eyed Jack. Sometimes to pay debts. Usually to pay bets. 

Despite everything, Jonny doesn’t hate his father. Not yet. Maybe a little, for bringing him into this godforsaken cesspit shithole of a life, but doesn’t everyone hate everyone else _just a little bit_?

Jonny walks up that wrought iron staircase, every clanking footstep sounding too much like a gunshot. Walks past the planter box full of sand and dry bulbs; his mother tried to grow flowers once. Flowers don’t grow in New Texas. He reaches for the door handle. The whole fucking door swings open at a touch. And Jonny knows something is wrong.

In New Texas, every man is a criminal. In New Texas, nowhere is safe. In New Texas, _you lock your doors._

The light blue walls are sprayed with gore, like someone took a hose to them. There is a clump of long, blonde hair and dark red scalp meat stuck to the vinyl beside Jonny’s shoe. In the center of the floor is his mother’s corpse, mauled bloody and almost beyond recognition. Five bullets shot directly into her skull, chunks of brain matter and white bone spread around it like a disgusting halo of flesh. Dress torn to shreds. Hands tied. Dark finger-mark bruises around her throat. Over her stands his fathe— _stands Billy Vangelis._ Six-gun in his hand. One bullet left.

Jonny doesn’t scream. Jonny doesn’t move. Jonny doesn’t want to die.

Billy takes three long, wet steps towards him. Towards the door. His boots squelch and crush the desecrated remains of Jonny’s mother underneath their iron soles. Billy takes off his hat, almost soaked through in crimson spray, and places it on the boy’s head. Their eyes meet, for a split, silent second. Then Billy speaks, six words.

“See you in the morning, son.”

><

Jonny Vangelis is still 16 when he wakes up, though he feels like he’s been alive for millennia.

Not that he knows how that feels, yet.

He remembers stepping over his mother’s body, into the kitchen. Into the liquor cabinet. Remembers downing every bottle of shitty Cyberian vodka they had, and then promptly throwing it up all over the already-gross, blood-sticky floor. Remembers getting in the bathtub, fully clothed, and turning the shower on. It ran cold. He must’ve passed out after that.

So currently, Jonny is in a sweltering furnace of an apartment, with the corpse of a woman who _didn’t really love him all that much anyway_ sizzling away like a fucking fried egg on the living room floor. The whole place smells like rotten meat, the stench has sunk into his skin and he feels sticky with it. Feels like a sucker someone spat out. Not to mention, he’s soaking _fucking_ wet and is somehow still covered in vomit.

He didn’t run away. After all, there’s nowhere to run in New Texas. Even if he gets shipped away to some prison colony in some backwater system like Midgar, it’d still have better food and better work than this old-fashioned nightmare of a planet.

There is a frantic banging at the door that Jonny can barely distinguish from the excruciating racket of his headache/hangover.

“Open the fucking door, boy! We know you’re in there!”

Jonny swears, loudly. Lifts his sodden self from the bathtub, waterlogged, strips off his deadweight jacket. He’s still wearing his father’s hat, and it smells like tobacco and smoke and malt whiskey. It smells like _Billy_. He drags himself back into the main room. It’s _thick_ with black, swarming masses of flies and other scavenging insects all feasting and fat on human flesh. _His mother’s flesh._ He’s sure she must be kilograms lighter with all the meat the bugs have carried away into their sandy holes and under the fridge, into the drains. Good for her. She always wanted to lose weight.

“Open the door before we break it down, Vangelis!”

Jonny takes his time making it to the door. Squashes a few particularly big cockroaches under his wet boots. A spider. Swats a few flies and relishes the sound they make crunching against his knuckles. Looks down at the corpse, the horrible, steaming, purple-red-black mess of the woman who birthed him. She wasn’t the greatest mother, and Jonny isn’t particularly grateful to her for squeezing him out. Beat him when she couldn’t take any more of his shit. Said some things that still haunt him behind closed eyelids. But she did endeavor to keep his child self clothed and fed, and he does feel a pang of sadness, regret perhaps, looking down at her mushy, crawling face. Regret that he didn’t get to say something meaningful before she died; whether that be a _‘thanks, I love you’_ or a _‘fuck you’_ , Jonny is still deciding.

A moment passes, muffled voices of the sheriff’s men from behind the door. Something about readying the barricade.

Jonny spits on the corpse with a wet _splat_. “Fuck you, ma,” he decides.

The door slams inwards, knob breaking a hole through the plaster wall in a puff of white powder. The flies abruptly scatter, a buzzing, insectoid whirlwind as they race to freedom. Two officers stand beyond the threshold, one looking about ready to throw up and one so red in the face he looks like a moustachioed cherry. They look at Jonny, then at the horrible, horrible corpse, and then back to Jonny. Horrible, horrible Jonny.

He gives a smile fake as a politicians. “Howdy, officers.”


	2. Nothing All That New To You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for a bad swear :O

Jonny Vangelis is 16 when he gets sold to Jack.

His father testified against him, and his low drawl still hangs heavy in his mind like a thick, syrupy molasses.

_‘So you’re telling me your boy here killed her?’  
‘Yessir. Saw him do it with my own two eyes, sir.’  
‘What did you see, exactly?’  
‘Heard the first shot, ran to help. I was too late, though. She was already dead, and the kid was shooting dead rounds into her, laughing like anything. Still see it when I close my eyes, sir. I hate to say it, but… I ran away, after that. I was scared for my life, Officer.’  
‘You expect me to believe that?’  
‘…Yessir. The boy’s always been a scoundrel. I tried to have faith in him, but…’  
‘Y’know, Mr. Vangelis? Maybe you are lucky, after all.’_

As the words replay themselves inside Jonny’s ears, he feels something in his chest grow tight. Something sharp, hard, burning like a supernova. A red hot lump of hatred.

Jonny’s been sitting in the Sheriff’s Office holding cell for days. It’s even hotter inside than out, the cell essentially a stone-and-wrought-iron oven. Just about expects someone to come in and baste him, flip him over, stick an apple in his mouth and rotate him. The officer present has one of those personal, portable air conditioners, and it feels like a test. Every receding hair moving in the breeze against his forehead feels like it’s taunting him, begging him to lose his marbles. He’s been thrown one piece of thankfully-buttered toast since his arrest, and the fat brown spider weaving a particularly terrible, stringy, asymmetrical web in the corner of his cell is starting to look _damn_ tasty. Jonny considers eating it out of spite just for doing such a shit job.

Even the spiders in New Texas are shitty. The whole goddamn planet is shitty. Jonny knows flying cars exist, he’s seen them on TV, but the people here still own _fucking_ horses. Still drive _fucking_ sedans. Still use _fucking_ landlines. Humans finally reach out and colonize every known galaxy, invent atmospheric regulation systems and anti-anti-gravity and _flying cars for christsake_ but some of them are still hung up over _the goddamn Chevrolet Caprice._ This isn’t _New_ Texas. This is just Old Texas 2.

So Jonny sits, and Jonny festers, and Jonny swelters, and Jonny _fucking_ prays. Prays to any god that might be listening. Prays that he might be transported to the furthest convict colony in the furthest asshole of the universe away from this place.

As it turns out, no god was listening.

“Guess it’s your lucky day, Vangelis.”

It’s the Sheriff. A mousey man with fingers a-itching to shoot. He smooths down the strays in his ass-hair moustache and spits an ugly brown glob onto the holding cell’s floor. “Your bail’s been paid in full.”

Jonny’s stomach sinks like it’s full of rocks. _No. No no no no. This isn’t right. This was his **out**_ **.** “By who?” he asks, voice hoarse and unfamiliar sounding in his throat.

“Jack. One Eyed Jack.”

And if Jonny’s gut wasn’t dead weight, anvil-heavy by his feet before, it definitely is now. One Eyed Jack… richest motherfucker in the west (which honestly isn’t saying much; pennies are rare in New Texas). Casino tycoon, loan shark, above-the-law, state-certified _cunt One Eyed Jack._ His family’s creditor. His family’s scourge. Rolling in every dollar they ever made.

See, Jonny’s father is an easily-addicted man. To what, you may ask, and the answer to that is _everything_. Alcohol, ponies, wheels, narcotics, women, dice, cards. Especially cards. Considered himself lucky, but in New Texas the game isn’t to win; the game is to cheat, and cheat better than everyone else. Billy Vangelis never understood why his luck took such a drastic plunge, but Jonny knows too well that behind every smile is a liar and inside every sleeve is a winning hand. But when you’re playing with One Eyed Jack, not even a winning hand can help you.

So the debt piled up, and piled up, and piled up. But Billy didn’t stop gambling. So his luck got worse, and worse, and worse. Getting one of Jack’s girls pregnant, now that really _was_ just bad luck. Lovely little drooling, screaming bundle of _even more debt._ Jack owned Billy. And now, Jack owns his son.

Jack owns Jonny.

The Sheriff jangles his keys, gives Jonny a Look somewhere between pity and ‘ _get fucked’,_ and unlocks the cell. “He’s waiting for you out front.”

When Jonny steps out of the Sheriff’s office he can barely feel his legs. Trunks of shaking flesh that won’t listen to him. His wrists ache where he’d been cuffed and his throat cries for water, and the midsummer New Texan sun is painfully bright. It takes all of his focus not to fall over and pass out right there in the dust and sand.

One Eyed Jack is standing by the bollards, where a pinto mare is tied. He’s a mountain of a man, looming heads over Jonny, wearing a three-piece black and purple suit tailored too tightly. He tips his hat with a ring-adorned hand, and as he smiles his teeth glint with artificial diamonds. “I bet you’re hungry, boy.”

Jonny’s appetite is gone.

><

Jonny Vangelis is 17 when he kills someone for the first time.

His work for Jack usually entails manning the bar, or dealing out cards. He’s too scrawny for security, and not sweet enough for anything else. Sometimes, he gets told to win. To enter games where someone is doing just a _little too well_ and pull the rug (and their life savings) out from under them. Jonny doesn’t have a knack for cards, but he does have a knack for cheating. Tonight, though, Jack has handed him a gun.

“Do you know how to shoot, boy?”

“What do you think?” Jonny answers, desperately hoping the tremor in his voice comes across as amusement rather than what it really is. _Fear_.

“I _think_ that you need to do a little something for me, Jonny. Just a small favor, to show me that you can pull your weight around here. And trust me, there are worse things I could ask of you than this,” Jack says back, almost crooning a melody. His voice sounds less like smooth honey and more like blood and chunks.

Now there are blood and chunks on Jonny’s hands. Jack’s _‘little something’_ was killing a man who found himself neck-deep in debt, had taken a loan to pay his child’s medical bills; begged and pleaded for a term extension, for more time. But Jack doesn’t give out time. He only takes it.

The pistol had felt cold and unfamiliar in Jonny’s hand. The trigger had felt too loose, the bullets too heavy inside it. And now he sits, knees pressed to the dry earth, over the ruptured stomach of a man whose time had been taken. Blood dribbles from the wounds in an ever-thinning stream, a bottle of cola shaken. It soaks into Jonny’s socks and morbidly feeds the brown, cracked grass around it. He’d meant for an instant death, but missed, shot the man in the gut. The hideous sound he had made, collapsing in a ruined pile, and the bloody gurgling as his throat began to fill with gore, are something Jonny thinks will never leave him.

They do, one day. But not today, or tomorrow. Or next year.

Jonny had panicked then, fired the rest of his rounds blindly into the man’s convulsing flesh, a desperate attempt to get it to stop, to get him to _finally die._ And now he is here, spattered in scarlet flecks and wet up to the elbows, hunched and shaking over the _finally dead_ corpse of a man that didn’t deserve it. He sniffs. It smells of rain.

Of ozone, petrichor. The moistening of the air and earth. He wishes the sky would break open, to cleanse the blood, to cleanse _him_ from the planet’s surface. Dig him up and wash him away. Carry him off with the tide. Drag him below the breaking waves. But there are no clouds. There are never clouds. Not here.

Not in New Texas.

Jonny thinks of the man’s child, and of all he was torn away from. Jonny thinks of the rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its summer and i want it to rain so bad that im writing it into fic

**Author's Note:**

> i actually planned this one so this will have five chapters! hopefully! probably not! it absolutely wont who am i kidding.


End file.
